Kn Moy
Senior Vice President, Innovation Strategy
As the marketplace fills with more and more noise, more and more “empowered consumers” are tuning out. Today, over two-thirds of consumers go out of their way to avoid marketing messages. That’s why TiVo is so popular. And that’s why more and more mail – snail mail and electronic mail – goes unopened.
In 2012, alongside the presidential race, 33 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, 11 gubernatorial, and a host of state and local seats will be contested in the national election on Tuesday, November 6. This will likely mean that in the months, weeks and days before the general election, your constituents and donors will face more competition for their attention than at any other time in the last four years.
This year’s campaign – conducted against the grimmest economic backdrop for a presidential race in 75 years – is shaping up as unusually frenetic, costly, grueling and unpredictable.
You probably know what the greatest threat is to nonprofit marketing. It’s not a sluggish economy or too many good causes out promoting themselves.
No, it’s actually an internal threat – the tendency of growing stale – both on the part of the ministry development staff and the marketing agency. Even with the greatest causes, when you live them 24/7, day after day, year after year, you can get predictable.
If content strategy is about actually figuring out where you're going and what you want to accomplish, editorial planning helps you figure out how to actually get the work done. Before you do editorial planning, make sure that you've weighed the costs and benefits of having a blog and thought about content strategy for your blog.
Once you've done that, you're ready to do some editorial planning. There are 3 main things that you should do during this process.
Step 1: Think sustainable
Most of us have the urge to get things done. We want to dive right in and feel like we're making progress. Usually that's a good thing, but with a blog it can be disastrous.
If you read my post from yesterday, you know that a blog is a big endeavor. If you decided that a blog really is a good idea for your organization, then you need to build a strategy for long-term success before you start writing. That's where content strategy comes in.
These 4 questions will start you down the right path.
ask if you should even have one.
You read the headline correctly. I just said that you should be taking a hard look at whether a blog is good for your organization.
Keeping a blog relevant and current is a lot of work. You need to make sure that your efforts will pay off before you put in the effort.
We’ve preached the importance of continuous online testing and optimization. But it really hit home when that resulted in a 209% better conversion rate for one of our clients in 2011.
The first important step was identifying an area for testing where a lift in results would make a real difference. We settled on the donation experience on the website.
Thank you USPS.
Our Postal Service did it again. As of January 22, rates increase by 2.1% on first-class mail, standard mail, periodicals, package services and extra services like shipping. While this is the first increase since 2009, like the frog in the pot of water on the stove, as rates rise we are feeling the heat. And while we’re not “cooked” yet, there is a level of rising discomfort. For many it’s a sense of impending doom.
Every year New Year’s resolutions are made and broken within the first few days of the year. Here are five strategic resolutions marketing professionals in Christian nonprofit organizations should consider. They can change your entire year.
1. Lose weight. Purge dead weight from your donor list to save money and improve performance. Start with an intensive address correction initiative.
It's been a busy year on the Masterworks blog. We've worked hard to make sure each and every post was valuable to you, our reader. I hope we've been successful.
To close out the year, here's a look at the 5 most popular posts of the year. Enjoy.
3 online reading behaviors you need to know about
Your donors and constituents read differently online. This means you need to write differently as well. This post shares the 3 reading behaviors that should most drastically influence your approach to writing online.
Early in 2011, I create a presentation to talk about trends to watch for in the New Year. While it is easy to make predictions and never revisit them, it’s more honest to look back where one is right and wrong.
The presentation started with a list of new things for 2010, it’s hard to believe that none of these things were well known in 2010 and many of them didn’t even exist:
- Original iPad
- Windows 7 phone and Droid X
- Mobile fundraising
- Wikileaks
- Facebook Places
- 3D: TVs, movies games
- Daily deals: groupon, living social
